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Roku, the company that makes web-connected TV boxes, announced Wednesday night that it raised a $45 million investment round led by News Corporation, BSkyB, Menlo Ventures, and Globespan Capital Partners.

Roku’s devices let you stream content from popular services such as Hulu, Netflix, HBO GO, and Pandora to your TV. The company plans to release a “Streaming Stick” in the fall that packs all of Roku’s features into a device that’s slightly larger than a USB thumb drive. (It’ll plug into a special HDMI port in some TVs.)

In the announcement, Roku says it’ll use the new cash to market its products in other countries and develop new hardware.

Roku currently offers four different boxes that start as low as $50. The top-of-the-line model costs $100.

With two big-name media companies now backing Roku, it’s very likely the company will be able to get some exclusive content not found on other streaming devices.

Next Issue Media is a digitial subscription service proposed by five of the world’s largest publishers (Conde Nast, Time Inc, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp). Users would receive as many digital magazines as they wish for a flat monthly rate of $10-15, depending on if you want delivery of weeklies like The New Yorker. And just like Hulu, the user will be able to freely pick and choose which content to consume.

The digital magazines will still read like physical magazines—top to bottom, left to right, including ads—which is kind of odd but likely a necessary intermediary step for publishers to make that cognitive leap to accepting digital publishing. At launch, 35 titles will be available for perusal including, Motor Trend, Popular Mechanics, and Time. More titles are expected to debut in the coming weeks.

“You download the Next Issue Media reader once, and all the magazines will be presented there in single format,” Morgan Guenther, CEO of Next Issue Media said. “We think we’ll have a compelling proposition.”

However if the Big Five is counting on this production immediately taking off, well, that’s not likely. NIM requires an app to run—an app only available on Android tablets running Honeycomb. That nobody thought to port this to—much less not build it specifically for—the iPad and its spiffy new Retina display is an inauspicious way to kick off a publishing platform.[allthingsd, Adweek – Image: The AP]

Burger King Corp. may have just the thing. The home of the Whopper has launched a new men’s body spray called “Flame.” The company describes the spray as “the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat.”

The fragrance is on sale at New York City retailer Ricky’s NYC in stores and online for a limited time for $3.99.

Burger King is marketing the product through a Web site featuring a photo of its King character reclining fireside and naked but for an animal fur strategically placed to not offend.

The marketing ploy is the latest in a string of viral ad campaigns by the company.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.